The Neapolitan Novels Read online

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2011-2015 by Edizioni E/O

  First publication 2015 by Europa Editions

  Translation by Ann Goldstein

  Original Title: L’amica geniale

  Translation copyright © 2012-2015 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  ISBN 9781609453282

  Elena Ferrante

  THE NEAPOLITAN NOVELS

  BOXED SET

  Translated from the Italian

  by Ann Goldstein

  PRAISE FOR ELENA FERRANTE’S NEAPOLITAN NOVELS

  FROM THE UNITED STATES

  “Ferrante’s writing is so unencumbered, so natural, and yet so lovely, brazen, and flush. The constancy of detail and the pacing that zips and skips then slows to a real-time crawl have an almost psychic effect, bringing you deeply into synchronicity with the discomforts and urgency of the characters’ emotions. Ferrante is unlike other writers—not because she’s innovative, but rather because she’s unselfconscious and brutally, diligently honest.”

  —Minna Proctor, Bookforum

  “Everyone should read anything with Ferrante’s name on it.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “In these bold, gorgeous, relentless novels, Ferrante traces the deep connections between the political and the domestic. This is a new version of the way we live now—one we need, one told brilliantly, by a woman.”

  —Roxana Robinson, The New York Times Book Review

  “An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends Lila and Elena, bright and passionate girls from a raucous neighborhood in world-class Naples. Ferrante writes with such aggression and unnerving psychological insight about the messy complexity of female friendship that the real world can drop away when you’re reading her.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Ferrante can do a woman’s interior dialogue like no one else, with a ferocity that is shockingly honest, unnervingly blunt.”

  —Booklist

  “Elena Ferrante’s gutsy and compulsively readable new novel, the first of a quartet, is a terrific entry point for Americans unfamiliar with the famously reclusive writer, whose go-for-broke tales of women’s shadow selves—those ambivalent mothers and seething divorcées too complex or unseemly for polite society (and most literary fiction, for that matter)—shimmer with Balzacian human detail and subtle psychological suspense . . . The Neapolitan novels offer one of the more nuanced portraits of feminine friendship in recent memory—from the make-up and break-up quarrels of young girls to the way in which we carefully define ourselves against each other as teens—Ferrante wisely balances her memoir-like emotional authenticity with a wry sociological understanding of a society on the verge of dramatic change.”

  —Megan O’Grady, Vogue

  “Elena Ferrante will blow you away.”

  —Alice Sebold

  “An engrossing, wildly original contemporary epic about the demonic power of human (and particularly female) creativity checked by the forces of history and society.”

  —The Los Angeles Review of Books

  “My Brilliant Friend is a sweeping family-centered epic that encompasses issues of loyalty, love, and a transforming Europe. This gorgeous novel should bring a host of new readers to one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors.”

  —The Barnes and Noble Review

  “[Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels] don’t merely offer a teeming vision of working-class Naples, with its cobblers and professors, communists and mobbed-up businessmen, womanizing poets and downtrodden wives; they present one of modern fiction’s richest portraits of a friendship.”

  —John Powers, “Fresh Air”, NPR

  “Ferrante tackles girlhood and friendship with amazing force.”

  —Gwyneth Paltrow

  “Ferrante draws an indelible picture of the city’s mean streets and the poverty, violence and sameness of lives lived in the same place forever . . . She is a fierce writer.”

  —Shelf Awareness

  “Ferrante transforms the love, separation and reunion of two poor urban girls into the general tragedy of their city.”

  —The New York Times

  “Elena Ferrante: the best angry woman writer ever!”

  —John Waters

  “Beautifully translated by Ann Goldstein . . . Ferrante writes with a ferocious, intimate urgency that is a celebration of anger. Ferrante is terribly good with anger, a very specific sort of wrath harbored by women, who are so often not allowed to give voice to it. We are angry, a lot of the time, at the position we’re in—whether it’s as wife, daughter, mother, friend—and I can think of no other woman writing who is so swift and gorgeous in this rage, so bracingly fearless in mining fury.”

  —Susanna Sonnenberg, The San Francisco Chronicle

  “The through-line in all of Ferrante’s investigations, for me, is nothing less than one long, mind-and-heart-shredding howl for the history of women (not only Neapolitan women), and its implicit j’accuse . . . Ferrante’s effect, critics agree, is inarguable. ‘Intensely, violently personal’ and ‘brutal directness, familial torment’ is how James Wood ventures to categorize her—descriptions that seem mild after you’ve encountered the work.”

  —Joan Frank, The San Francisco Chronicle

  “Lila, mercurial, unsparing, and, at the end of this first episode in a planned trilogy from Ferrante, seemingly capable of starting a full-scale neighborhood war, is a memorable character.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Ferrante’s own writing has no limits, is willing to take every thought forward to its most radical conclusion and backward to its most radical birthing.”—The New Yorker

  FROM THE UNITED KINGDOM

  “Nothing quite like it has ever been published.”

  —The Guardian

  “The Story of a New Name, like its predecessor, is fiction of the very highest order.”

  —Independent on Sunday

  “My Brilliant Friend, translated by Ann Goldstein, is stunning: an intense, forensic exploration of the friendship between Lila and the story’s narrator, Elena. Ferrante’s evocation of the working-class district of Naples where Elena and Lila first meet as two wiry eight-year-olds is cinematic in the density of its detail.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement

  “This is a story about friendship as a mass of roiling currents—love, envy, pity, spite, dependency and Schadenfreude coiling around one another, tricky to untangle.”

  —Intelligent Life

  “Elena Ferrante may be the best contemporary novelist you have never heard of. The Italian author has written six lavishly praised novels. But she writes under a pseudonym and will not offer herself for public consumption. Her characters likewise defy convention . . . Her prose is crystal, and her storytelling both visceral and compelling.”

  —The Economist

  FROM ITALY

  “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay evokes the vital flux of a heartbeat, of blood flowing through our veins.”

  —La Repubblica

  “We don’t know who she is, but it doesn’t matter. Ferrante’s books are enthralling self-contained monoliths that do not seek fr
iendship but demand silent, fervid admiration from her passionate readers . . . The thing most real in these novels is the intense, almost osmotic relationship that unites Elena and Lila, the two girls from a neighborhood in Naples who are the peerless protagonists of the Neapolitan novels.”

  —Famiglia Cristiana

  “Today it is near impossible to find writers capable of bringing smells, tastes, feelings, and contradictory passions to their pages. Elena Ferrante, alone, seems able to do it. There is no writer better suited to composing the great Italian novel of her generation, her country, and her time.”

  —Il Manifesto

  “Regardless of who is behind the name Elena Ferrante, the mysterious pseudonym used by the author of the Neapolitan novels, two things are certain: she is a woman and she knows how to describe Naples like nobody else. She does so with a style that recalls an enchanted spider web with its expressive power and the wizardry with which it creates an entire world.”

  —Huffington Post (Italy)

  “A marvel that is without limits and beyond genre.”

  —Il Salvagente

  “Elena Ferrante is proving that literature can cure our present ills; it can cure the spirit by operating as an antidote to the nervous attempts we make to see ourselves reflected in the present-day of a country that is increasingly repellent.”

  —Il Mattino

  “My Brilliant Friend flows from the soul like an eruption from Mount Vesuvius.”

  —La Repubblica

  FROM AUSTRALIA

  “No one has a voice quite like Ferrante’s. Her gritty, ruthlessly frank novels roar off the page with a barbed fury, like an attack that is also a defense . . . Ferrante’s fictions are fierce, unsentimental glimpses at the way a woman is constantly under threat, her identity submerged in marriage, eclipsed by motherhood, mythologised by desire. Imagine if Jane Austen got angry and you’ll have some idea of how explosive these works are.”

  —John Freeman, The Australian

  “One of the most astounding—and mysterious—contemporary Italian novelists available in translation, Elena Ferrante unfolds the tumultuous inner lives of women in her thrillingly menacing stories of lost love, negligent mothers and unfulfilled desires.”

  —The Age

  “Ferrante bewitches with her tiny, intricately drawn world . . . My Brilliant Friend journeys fearlessly into some of that murkier psychological territory where questions of individual identity are inextricable from circumstance and the ever-changing identities of others.”

  —The Melbourne Review

  “The Neapolitan novels move far from contrivance, logic or respectability to ask uncomfortable questions about how we live, how we love, how we singe an existence in a deeply flawed world that expects pretty acquiescence from its women. In all their beauty, their ugliness, their devotion and deceit, these girls enchant and repulse, like life, like our very selves.”

  —The Sydney Morning Herald

  FROM SPAIN

  “Elena Ferrante’s female characters are genuine works of art . . . It is clear that her novel is the child of Italian neorealism and an abiding fascination with scene.”

  —El Pais

  MY BRILLIANT FRIEND

  INDEX OF CHARACTERS

  The Cerullo family (the shoemaker’s family):

  Fernando Cerullo, shoemaker.

  Nunzia Cerullo, wife of Fernando and Lila’s mother.

  Raffaella Cerullo, called Lina, and by Elena Lila.

  Rino Cerullo, Lila’s older brother, also a shoemaker.

  Rino, also the name of one of Lila’s children.

  Other children.

  The Greco family (the porter’s family):

  Elena Greco, called Lenuccia or Lenù. She is the oldest, and after her are Peppe, Gianni, and Elisa.

  The father is a porter at the city hall.

  The mother is a housewife.

  The Carracci family (Don Achille’s family):

  Don Achille Carracci, the ogre of fairy tales.

  Maria Carracci, wife of Don Achille.

  Stefano Carracci, son of Don Achille, grocer in the family store.

  Pinuccia and Alfonso Carracci, Don Achille’s two other children.

  The Peluso family (the carpenter’s family):

  Alfredo Peluso, carpenter.

  Giuseppina Peluso, wife of Alfredo.

  Pasquale Peluso, older son of Alfredo and Giuseppina, construction worker.

  Carmela Peluso, who is also called Carmen, sister of Pasquale, salesclerk in a dry-goods store.

  Other children.

  The Cappuccio family (the mad widow’s family):

  Melina, a relative of Lila’s mother, a mad widow.

  Melina’s husband, who unloaded crates at the fruit and vegetable market.

  Ada Cappuccio, Melina’s daughter.

  Antonio Cappuccio, her brother, a mechanic.

  Other children.

  The Sarratore family (the railroad worker poet’s family):

  Donato Sarratore, conductor.

  Lidia Sarratore, wife of Donato.

  Nino Sarratore, the oldest of the five children of Donato and Lidia.

  Marisa Sarratore, daughter of Donato and Lidia.

  Pino, Clelia, and Ciro Sarratore, younger children of Donato and Lidia.

  The Scanno family (the fruit and vegetable seller’s family):

  Nicola Scanno, fruit and vegetable seller.

  Assunta Scanno, wife of Nicola.

  Enzo Scanno, son of Nicola and Assunta, also a fruit and vegetable seller.

  Other children.

  The Solara family (the family of the owner of the Solara bar-pastry shop):

  Silvio Solara, owner of the bar-pastry shop.

  Manuela Solara, wife of Silvio.

  Marcello and Michele Solara, sons of Silvio and Manuela.

  The Spagnuolo family (the baker’s family):

  Signor Spagnuolo, pastry maker at the bar-pastry shop Solara.

  Rosa Spagnuolo, wife of the pastry maker.

  Gigliola Spagnuolo, daughter of the pastry maker.

  Other children.

  Gino, son of the pharmacist.

  The teachers:

  Maestro Ferraro, teacher and librarian.

  Maestra Oliviero, teacher.

  Professor Gerace, high school teacher.

  Professor Galiani, high school teacher.

  Nella Incardo, Maestra Oliviero’s cousin, who lives on Ischia.

  PROLOGUE

  Eliminating All the Traces

  1.

  This morning Rino telephoned. I thought he wanted money again and I was ready to say no. But that was not the reason for the phone call: his mother was gone.

  “Since when?”

  “Since two weeks ago.”

  “And you’re calling me now?”

  My tone must have seemed hostile, even though I wasn’t angry or offended; there was just a touch of sarcasm. He tried to respond but he did so in an awkward, muddled way, half in dialect, half in Italian. He said he was sure that his mother was wandering around Naples as usual.

  “Even at night?”

  “You know how she is.”

  “I do, but does two weeks of absence seem normal?”

  “Yes. You haven’t seen her for a while, Elena, she’s gotten worse: she’s never sleepy, she comes in, goes out, does what she likes.”

  Anyway, in the end he had started to get worried. He had asked everyone, made the rounds of the hospitals: he had even gone to the police. Nothing, his mother wasn’t anywhere. What a good son: a large man, forty years old, who hadn’t worked in his life, just a small-time crook and spendthrift. I could imagine how carefully he had done his searching. Not at all. He had no brain, and in his heart he had only himself.


  “She’s not with you?” he asked suddenly.

  His mother? Here in Turin? He knew the situation perfectly well, he was speaking only to speak. Yes, he liked to travel, he had come to my house at least a dozen times, without being invited. His mother, whom I would have welcomed with pleasure, had never left Naples in her life. I answered:

  “No, she’s not with me.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Rino, please, I told you she’s not here.”

  “Then where has she gone?”

  He began to cry and I let him act out his desperation, sobs that began fake and became real. When he stopped I said:

  “Please, for once behave as she would like: don’t look for her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I said. It’s pointless. Learn to stand on your own two feet and don’t call me again, either.”

  I hung up.

  2.

  Rino’s mother is named Raffaella Cerullo, but everyone has always called her Lina. Not me, I’ve never used either her first name or her last. To me, for more than sixty years, she’s been Lila. If I were to call her Lina or Raffaella, suddenly, like that, she would think our friendship was over.

  It’s been at least three decades since she told me that she wanted to disappear without leaving a trace, and I’m the only one who knows what she means. She never had in mind any sort of flight, a change of identity, the dream of making a new life somewhere else. And she never thought of suicide, repulsed by the idea that Rino would have anything to do with her body, and be forced to attend to the details. She meant something different: she wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found. And since I know her well, or at least I think I know her, I take it for granted that she has found a way to disappear, to leave not so much as a hair anywhere in this world.